u/Mean-Drama2630 — reddlx

I wish all search engines disclosed their providers visibly

I used DDG for years without knowing it was a Bing proxy, simply because they were quite evasive about it. Other alternative search engines seem to do the same thing, to varying extents.

I was trying out Ecosia recently and I thought it was cool how they basically tell you on the results page which index was used. It seems you can opt-out of Google entirely, which is a nice feature for degooglers.

u/Mean-Drama2630 — 9 days ago

▲ 36 r/Ecosia

Anyone else want more panels like this?

Instant answers, knowledge panels, whatever you call them. Ecosia has a few: the Wikipedia one is great, the maps one is just a link to Google Maps but it’s ok, the calculator and unit conversions are useful, time zones too etc.

But there’s a lot of pop culture and entertainment related panels that I would love to see. Music, sports, films, tv, etc. Google and Bing do it well.

Maybe it’s expensive or something, but in my opinion, very high value for users.

u/Mean-Drama2630 — 13 days ago

▲ 17 r/Ecosia

Test Ecosia's EUSP Index

A bit of potentially interesting info for anyone who missed it.

Earlier this week, the API for Ecosia and Qwant's independent EUSP index (Staan) was made public for companies.

The English-language web is obviously huge, which is why Ecosia only deploys EUSP in French for now, until the quality is better. But you can actually test it out in English, via third-parties that are EUSP customers.

xPrivo (https://www.xprivo.com/search) has gained access to the new index, and will display results for any region. In cases where there are no good results in the index, it seems there is a fallback to standard providers.

I'm surprised by how developed it already is even for English results, to be honest. A long way from deployment, but it will get a lot better over time.

reddit.com

u/Mean-Drama2630 — 2 months ago

▲ 5 r/Ecosia

Ads in AI Chat look a little messy

https://preview.redd.it/fji28twnnt6h1.png?width=1257&format=png&auto=webp&s=7294c88322349224091d7a6842142d281ea43fb5

[TW: AI]

In principle, I am fine with ads here, because they are the thing that makes the trees possible after all. But search engine style ads right after an answer is a little bit messy, especially considering the majority of ads (with rare exceptions) are scammy nonsense anyway. Makes the interface a little cheap.

I would suggest maybe having them display differently. Maybe a horizontal scroll somehow rather than taking up vertical space? Or an arrow to collapse them. OpenAI had some ideas for integrating ads into ChatGPT, and as much as I dislike that company, if it can be done cleanly and for a good cause, that's what we're here for. If there are any Ecosia devs here, please look into this. And if people have other ideas feel free to share.

reddit.com

u/Mean-Drama2630 — 2 months ago